Month: March 2017

CPH: DOX

 

https://cphdox.dk/mere-end-film/cphconference/

CPH: DOX (documentary film festival) introduced this year a week conference with a wide range of speakers from the industry, art scene, science, etc.
I attended one day of the conference under the headline Art, Technology & Change.

Computer Says NO
Speaker: Matthew Stender, Tech Ethicist, Germany
Artificial intelligence (AI) now drives decision making processes for human resource departments, police forces, and financial institutions. As technology advances, increased transparency and oversight is needed to evaluate and audit AI systems and their outcomes. In the pursuit of an algorithmic governance framework that is free of bias, should we look to the future or the past?

Matthew talked about the ethical challenge in the light of artificial intelligence.
By 2029 computer will have a human level of intelligence. It raises frightening and fascinating future’s prospects what will be the governance role and responsibility?
He mentioned Jerry Kaplan, who I just googled and found this quote:
We need to develop engineering discipline of computable ethics, and we need to have course sequences at our engineering schools that teach how to get machines to behave appropriately in a wide variety of new circumstances.
http://jerrykaplan.com/speaking/

Matthew also mentioned Kate Crawford for talking about the hidden biases in big data. Need further investigation.
http://www.katecrawford.net/

Inside Syria’s Secret Prison
Speaker: Christina Varvia, Researcher & Project Coordinator, Forensic Architecture, UK
Stories emerged in January that 13.000 have secretly been hanged in Syria’s notorious prison, Saydnaya, a journalistic no-go-zone. Now ex-detainees have collaborated with Amnesty International and Forensic Architecture, a multidisciplinary team consisting of architects, scientists, artists, and journalists, to build an accurate model of the prison based on 3D architectural modeling and ear-testimony to cast light in Syria’s hellish torture prison.

This project affected me a lot; the cruel subject of the story and the way of working with memories. Christina explained how the former prisoners remembered scale and construction by using their body as a measuring device and their experience of acoustics. Those horrifying memories and a single satellite photo made them able to modeling the prison and populate it with shadow like prisoners.
The unreal location and characters were carrying not only a story for people like me, but it also helped the former prisoners to find a way through the trauma while building the place in cooperation with the project team.

Journalism in the 21st-Century
Speaker: Francesca Panetta, Executive Editor, Virtual Reality, Guardian, UK
What once was a newspaper now exists on paper, online, on mobile, and on a device strapped to your head. What is a newspaper now? How important is keeping up with technology to their future? And how does journalism change across different platforms? Including a projected preview VR walk-through of a brand-new film.
Speaker: Ram Devineni, Producer/Director, Rattapallax, USA / India
Ram Devinini will demonstrate how the low-tech art of comic books and street art, with high-tech interactivity of Augmented Reality, has been used to confront the sensitive issue of gender-based violence in India, with a live demo of the AR experience that can also be seen in the exhibition at Charlottenborg.

Can Artificial Intelligence Be Creative?
Speaker: John R Smith, IBM Fellow and Manager of Multimedia and Vision at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, USA
IBM’s Research & Development team created the trailer for the thriller Morgan by analyzing more than 100 horror film trailers. It shows how AI might be used in the creative industries and explores whether creativity can be analyzed and recreated methodically.

Audiovisual workshop

Last week I organized a workshop (at DMJX) in cooperation with a composer and sound designer. The workshop was created for a mix of sound- and motion graphic design students.
The workshop, which we have conducted before, was an experiment without a unique answer. The students worked in teams, and all that they needed was their personal memories, reflections, and interpretation to create a solution.
The output: 45 seconds long audiovisual work.

Description:
The sense of smell has a special direct way to the memory center in the brain. An odor can lead us back into the past, remind us of a particular location, and evoke emotions – everything personally experienced.
We can recognize a lot of different smells, but our vocabulary comes to an end while describing it.
In this workshop, we transformed the impression of smells to sound and image. The senses of smell directed the senses of seeing and hearing and thereby created the mood, style, and tension for an audiovisual artwork.

Method:
· Sniff to two smells, describe and classify them
· Make an interpretation and write down a short synopsis.
· Outline the idea by using specific visualization methods for both sound and image.
· Produce the final solution.
· Presentation and feedback.

We have some underlying goals for this course like; cooperation, transforming impression from one sense to other senses, experience how the sense of smell and its impact had an influence on our perception.
This year, I was more aware of understanding the assignment as an art project, based on this thought, I think it gave the students a bigger freedom to work with their own style and be more experimental in the few days the course was going on.

Feedback and my reflection from Mid Point Review

It took longer time than suspected to make the presentation. It was a challenge to select the most important topics and boiled them down to five minutes, but when it was done, I had a much better overview.
It was pretty hard to hear the live streaming part, I was, therefore, more focused on the chat, during the session.
Afterward, I emailed Ed asking for his comments. He was nice to send me a little summarize and added some thoughts of his own.

Ed thinks there were two threads of interest. One is of the inherent “analogue” nature of the 20th-century surrealist movement – how it relied on very organic and natural principles to depict unnatural but still mechanical (man-made) objects (melting clocks for example). Second is of the absurdities, juxtapositions or textual elements that force the audience to interpret (Rene Magritte) or visual allusions (Joan Miro).

Ed and some of the others talked about the idea of capturing something of the essence of dreams is not new, but the technique of keeping a dream diary and somehow disciplining yourself to make notes of key elements. Ed had a music dream diary – and this led to a discussion about how the more you document your dreams, the more vivid your dreams become.
There was a general suggestion of how I could tap into dreams by summarizing them or sketching them.

My word cut-up approach has the same feel – juxtaposing ideas and concepts as they often are smashed together in dreams. William Burroughs had a profound influence on the late 1970s, post-punk “Industrial” art projects such a “Coum Transmissions” (referenced by Joseph Delaney).
Joseph, Joe, and others contributed to an idea of the capture of dreams as what Ed would call, a waking ritual (a pen and pad beside the bed).

Ed:
It’s interesting that you get other people to put the cut-up words together. Listen to “Williams Mix” by John Cage, a tape piece constructed by chance procedures, splicing of hundreds or thousands of sound clips, by many associates of Cage and Cage himself. Pieces of audio tape were categorized and placed into bowls. Composer friends of Cage would pick pieces of tape out of a chosen bowl (city, country, electronic, manually produced, wind, and “small” sounds) and splice them into the piece.

Miriam:
‘I also have an interest in surrealist, the interesting factors of surrealist that I like are inappropriate and unreal, however, it doesn’t separate from real life, it magnifies the feeling of an artist, how they feel about the real life.I like the way Eng asked people to pick words, try to find the connection of them, and showing them on a picture.it is hard to form an absurd thought by one person.

Manolis:
I’m looking forward to the introduction of code to Eng’s work. Looking forward to digital surrealism

Nancy:
Eng’s approach shows thought, experimentation, research, rethinking, and reworking. Insightful. It is interesting to see her art as a connection to the surrealist process, using dreams as to tool to explore the changing of the human body and integrating traditional and digital tools to find her way

Inga:
Eng has discovered her voice, I think. Sadly, she didn’t include her all dream illustrations (which I think are great), but I love that using automatic drawing technique, let her developed and (in a way) interpret her dreams. Also, that she doesn’t mind playing with her personal experiences and willing to use elements as a part of the game

Will:
I am really interested in the idea of the image generator Eng talked about, this has the ability to generate far more results than the human, also I would be interested to see if Eng pursues a 3d motion graphics approach to surrealism

Inga:
I wonder, what Eng is thinking how she would present her work in the end?
Inga Linevičiūtė: also, Eng can create a platform or a place, where people can submit their dreams and become a part of this generated image project

My reflection:
It was a good experience showing my project and getting comments and feedback from the other students, Jonathan and Ed.
It was important that people en general liked the images and the surrealistic visualization methods I have used. It strengthens my idea of making a bank of visual material from where I can experiment with media and different expression forms.
Ed talked about two threads of interest; one is about depicting, objects and motif in the surrealistic field and the other about absurdities and juxtapositions. I have mostly been focused on the second thread; ex. my cut out words experiment. I’m not sure if I will follow the other thread; I do not have to be 100 % surrealistic, just use element I find interesting, but I will defiantly pay attention to this area.
Using surrealism is a skeleton for my development and not a project to a reinvention of surrealism.

The idea of making a dream-machine and all the links I got inspire me a lot and will be something I have to investigate.

Links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COUM_Transmissions
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/jun/16/williamburroughs
https://mattrogalsky.bandcamp.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamachine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Throbbing_Gristle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genesis_P-Orridge

Copenhagen Contemporary: Sarah Sze

This work expand my understanding of video installation, I was pleased and surprised by the life and presence the installation expressed.

IMG_0370

From the catalog:
Sarah Sze’s installation Timekeeper (2016) explores the origin of the moving image, and mirrors the endless flow of information that overwhelms us every day. Screens flicker and fade, and projected images race cyclically around the room. A whirring, clicking world of objects is arranged in accordance with a specific logic: that of a working desk, a site of the studio. Formed in part from the remnants of the actual editing desk where the work was made, Timekeeper is simultaneously a sculptural installation and a functional tool: a projector itself.

Sze’s sprawling sculptures are not definitively delineated in space, a contrast to the traditional concept of sculpture where the work is distinct and can be isolated from its surroundings. For this reason, many of Sze’s sculptures appear like works in progress: when you encounter the work it feels as if the artist has only just stepped out of the room for a minute, making us wonder whether the work is still under construction or perhaps being dismantled.

One of the recurring traits of Sze’s work is her interest in time. However, Sze does not work with the usual chronological and mechanical concept of time as something that can be measured and recorded; rather, she explores time as something that arises out of the unpredictable ways in which the images and experiences of everyday life affect our sense of time passing.

Science seeks to define time by measuring it down to the smallest nanosecond, and we live our lives in accordance with this approach. Timekeeper challenges such an objective view, creating instead a perception of time in which experiences and frames of reference are brought into play upon encountering the work. Taking the form of a three-dimensional collage, Timekeeper holds and hides moments and memories that can be re-experienced across time and place by each individual who visits.

About Sarah Sze
Sarah Sze (b. 1969) lives and works in New York, USA. She represented the USA at the 2013 Venice Biennial, and was a 2003 MacArthur Fellow. Sze has exhibited her work at museums throughout the world, and her work is held in the collections of prominent institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Guggenheim Museum in New York, Fondation Cartier in Paris, Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Museum of Modern Art in Los Angeles.

 

Surrealist Art Styles: Figuration and Abstraction

I want to make the same experiment with my dream images as I did with the list of words, related to the dream images. I will cut out elements from the pictures and randomly put them together in new constellations, new scales, and positions.
In this case, I want to involve coding as a tool for randomness.
Before setting up the cuts and coding, I have to look the visual language in surrealistic paintings; composition, shapes, contrast, etc. Maybe I can gather inspiration to create the function of the code.

Two main directions within Surrealism:
One was dependent on figuration, on the precise reproduction of natural forms – generally detached, dislocated, juxtaposed, transposed, or mutated far from real-life situations.
The second style of Surrealism was abstract, based on imagery without specific reference to natural shapes, and was largely dependent on forms generated by the unconscious.

Figurative Surrealism
The figurative or representational style of Surrealism (Veristic) appears at its most successful in the work of Magritte, Dali, and Delvaux, and in the work of certain other artists who in their variety and achievement escape categorization in any one mode. Picasso was one, Ernst was another, and Arp yet another, and in the 1930s and 1940s Giacometti and Moore (1898-1986).

Abstract Surrealism
In brief, surrealist abstraction rejected geometric shapes in favor of the visual and emotional impact of organic forms of nature: either actual (Jean Arp, Andre Masson, Joan Miro) or imagined (Yves Tanguy, Robert Matta).
The non-representational direction of Surrealism was no less vigorous. The work of Jean Arp was more often non-figurative, but the major artists most consistently independent of natural phenomena were the Spaniard Joan Miro (1893-1983) and the Frenchman Andre Masson (1896-1987), who had studios side by side in Paris and who both joined Breton’s surrealist group at its launch in 1924. For a period, both artists experimented freely with “automatic” drawings, the visual counterpart of “automatic” writing, which aim was to allow the free association needed to create a spontaneous expression. Both artists found that geometric abstraction – was sterile and inadequate to their needs.

Source: http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/history-of-art/surrealism.htm

Workshop at South Kiosk Gallery

http://www.southkiosk.com/

Two days collaborative working with installation for South Kiosk Gallery in Peckham. The idea was to respond on their current show: “We will meet in the place where there is no darkness” by the artist Sebastian Kite (architect and performer).

The work took form as an installation; two identical rooms separated by a transparent wall. The rooms built of industrial material for insulation. Two different video projections covered one of the ends, Sound/music played from eight loudspeakers, the light source was the videos and the reflections on the delicate transparent wall.
The movements and transitions in the video were super slow and the sound indefinable.
Kite creates an intense experience while using sound, image, and space in ist simplest form. He’s installation references back to Orwell’s interrogation room (1984) using light as a material to create an ever-evolving space.

I had a claustrophobic experience – not to be in the room but to be inside of me; tinnitus like sound which I could not determine the direction of, and a video projection closed to static images. After a while, I perceived small and subtle changes more elegant and compelling (duration 30 minutes).

We had the freedom to use the installation; the rooms, projectors and sound system. My group decided to stay inside the room using projector and sound. Our first idea was vague; we agreed some keywords like positive/negative, mirroring and distortion. We split up, one team worked with real sound recordings from the room, and the other team (Miriam, Neslihan and I) went back to the studio at Camberwell, borrowed a camera and recorded experiments with a metallic embroidery thread, light, and movements.
We used things we found in the studio; a box, a ring, stick, textile and a ladder.
We had fun, and the outcome showed a direction which was interesting. If more time we would make new recordings build on the first experiments.
New keywords appeared like; breaking the grid and human presence.
Despite vague idea, sound and image complimented each other ok.